Career discussions

We looked at Reddit career discussions to understand the top career areas and sectors mentioned by users. We looked at all Reddit users, which covers people posting across the world, and then narrowed this down to a subset of users in the UK, based on UK relevant terms that they used in their posts. These terms included nations like England, and Scotland, and local place names like Chelmsford, and Leeds. 1

Mentions of careers on Reddit (All)

Sectors

Number of mentions

Number of mentions

Finance

1315

Energy

468

Cyclical consumer goods

388

Industrials

329

Technology

162

Healthcare

156

Utilities

107

Basic materials

54

Non-cyclical consumer goods

24

Telecom services

2

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When we looked at all Reddit users, we found that Technology is the fifth most mentioned career area, they tend to mention Financials and Energy most often when talking about careers.

Mentions of careers on Reddit (UK)

Sectors

Number of mentions

Number of mentions

Finance

14

Cyclical consumer goods

9

Energy

8

Industrials

4

Healthcare

3

Technology

2

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For those users based in the UK, Technology was the sixth most mentioned career – behind Financials, Energy, Industrials, Cyclical Consumer Goods and Services (like restaurants and shops), and Healthcare.

Financial services was low on the career charts for both young men and women, falling 8th out of 11 career areas based on young people’s survey responses. This leads us to interpret mentions on Reddit not as an indication of a future career preference, but as a career area that young people have strong views on.

Like much research that has been discussed in the previous sections on tech and STEM intensive careers, in fields like finance and banking, studies have found that women (who are often in the minority compared to men) may experience or perceive negative stereotyping in the workplace.

This could lead to negative job attitudes and intentions to quit because of its effects on identity separation, or the perception that a female gender identity is incompatible with a work identity in finance. 2

Notes:

We used the names of Travel to Work Areas across the UK to capture discussions that included highly granular place-based discussions. ↩

What are the top jobs mentioned?

Programmers are the most frequently mentioned tech job on Reddit in the context of career discussions. Other popular jobs that were mentioned include labels associated with seniority, including Executive and Manager.

Discussions on Reddit including mentions of tech jobs (All)

Date

Number of questions and replies

Programmer

Manager

Executive

Database

12/31/17

22

0

10

0

01/07/18

29

0

11

3

01/14/18

213

13

19

1

01/21/18

348

27

45

4

01/28/18

47

0

4

0

02/04/18

0

0

0

0

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What sentiment do young people associate with different careers?

When we look further into the sectors that users are talking about on Reddit, we can see that sectors like Finance and Energy are commonly mentioned with an opinion term, both positive and negative.

Von Hippel et al.’s study, 1 showed when women were exposed to negative gender stereotyping in their workplace, they reported lower levels of well-being at work and were less likely to recommend their field to other women.

Therefore, recruitment and retention of women into fields where they have been historically underrepresented is important for two reasons:

1) It is key to achieving a more representative, diverse and inclusive workforce, where women (but – crucially – all other currently underrepresented groups of people) feel like they belong, and can identify with, and;

2) by promoting diversity, and ensuring that the workforce is representative of the diverse societies in which we live, it would – in turn – reduce perceptions of tokenism, and encourage women to feel more able to apply to roles in not only finance, but also tech and STEM intensive careers.